sci-fi
Simon Munk
The Saints Row series has always been something of a magpie, stealing liberally from other games. It started out as a cheap second-tier Grand Theft Auto clone. But here, it transforms into a very silly, but great fun knockabout superhero game - the most gleefully rampaging fun gameplay you'll see this week.Trying to summarise the plot of Saints Row IV should give you some sense of exactly how seriously the game takes itself. The members of a street gang, called The Saints, decide to put their gangbanging past behind them and turn their appetite for destruction to good – they take on a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Neil Blomkamp’s got a thing for crafts. Spacecrafts, that is. With his first feature, District 9, alien ships hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. Now it’s 2154 and Elysium, a nirvana-like space station for the elite, floats in Earth’s orbit, using all the global resources and leaving the planet ravaged, polluted, riddled with crime and simply dreadful.Max (Matt Damon) is an ex-con gone straight. As a boy, he promised his childhood girlfriend Frey (Alice Braga) they too would live in Elysium. Of course, in the grown-up world, that’s impossible: they're only ordinary citizens. Making matters Read more ...
Simon Munk
This curious strategy series popped out of the head of legendary games-maker Shigeru "Mario, Donkey Kong" Miyamoto when he started gardening. But beneath the verdant landscapes and gigantic primary-coloured fruits there is a darker, richer soil.In Pikmin 3, three space people arrive on an unspoilt planet, desperately seeking food, their own planet having been strip-mined to starvation. In this new lush land they find an abundence of food, and a curious species - half flower, half ant. The Pikmin are only too happy to help the spacefarers – carrying food, attacking predatory enemies, ferrying Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre. In this case the local population is replaced by robots (although what precisely constitutes a robot is one of the film’s fun running gags).Is there just a hint of weariness as Pegg, Wright and faithful lumpen co- Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a capsule description of Pacific Rim, "giant monsters versus giant robots" will do nicely. It tells the fantastical story of mankind's battle for survival against a bunch of enormous killer reptiles from outer space, known manga-ishly as "Kaiju", which now live in a "dimensional rift" at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.These things keep lumbering ashore and laying waste to cities around the eponymous Pacific Rim, and though they're not quite indestructible, conventional tanks and planes can't get the job done. Thus the earthlings fight back by building vast fighting machines the size of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters. Brad Pitt's zombie flick - directed by Marc Quantum of Solace Forster - falls short all round, and makes the evolving characters and storylines of TV's The Walking Dead look positively Shakespearean by comparison.Spoilers are of course to be deplored, but the story here is so predictable that there's not a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story goes that Ben Affleck was in the running to direct the latest Superman "reboot", but decided against. "A lesson I've learned is not to look at movies based on budget," he said. "Story is what's important."And so it came to pass that Man of Steel was directed by Zack Snyder (who made Watchmen and 300, among others), cost £145m and clocks in at a sprawling 143 minutes. It's already recouped £110m through product placements, so somebody in the back end has their head screwed on, but nonetheless it's living proof of Affleck's Law. The flick is technologically dazzling and Henry Cavill Read more ...
Simon Munk
Gaming's equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – here we see a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion not as an excuse for all-out gory action, but downbeat introspection, gentle character interaction and moral tests in the face of true, human horror.The Last Of Us is an absolute must-play game, that doesn't entirely hit every note, but at least aims far higher than most videogames not just in terms of narrative ambition and grown-up storytelling, but also visual and action realism.The story is of hardened survivor Joel, who ends up grudgingly entrusted with the care of teen Ellie. She was born Read more ...
Simon Munk
Memory is fertile ground for dystopian science fiction. After all, if you can't remember the past properly, if your memories are fake, implanted, then you can't trust your own beliefs or the history that you are being told informs the current political discourse.Charlie Brooker's excellent Black Mirror series looked at this with "The Entire History Of You" episode and science fiction writer (and paranoid schizophrenic) Philip K Dick was a master of memory games ‑ see both Total Recall and Bladerunner. At the core of Remember Me is a brilliant, interactive take on implanted memories.Nilin is Read more ...
Simon Munk
Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.If this was a Hollywood treatment of post-apocalypse woe, humanity would unite in the face of such horrors. Here, the survivors have splintered into factions based on past ideologies – busy tearing each other to Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Controversy is a fickle mistress. When Carmageddon first appeared on PC in 1997, publishers Interplay were forced to cut its copious gore and replace dismembered pedestrians with nice, family-friendly zombies after a publicity-courting submission to the British Board of Film Classification went a bit wrong.Despite the changes - and thanks to some easily installed patches to put the blood back in - the game was still shocking and salacious enough to sell over two million copies and spawn ports for numerous consoles plus a sequel and several add-on packs. Sixteen years on, Carmageddon has Read more ...